Research Triangle Park, NC and Indianapolis, IN September 2, 2004. Mi-Co announced today that Sutter Health, a network of 28 acute care hospitals in northern California with over 41,000 employees, has licensed Mi-Forms software system to increase the efficiency of the hospital's mobile data collection. Mi-Forms will be implemented initially at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco on Tablet PCs to streamline the collection of clinical data for their cardiology department.

"The system conforms to the way our time-constrained professionals work", says Dr. Richard Shaw, Director of Research, Quality and Education for the Sutter Pacific Heart Centers of Sutter Health. "We've simply replaced pen and paper with digital ink and Tablet PCs. With this change, we're now in a position to collect an entire spectrum of data and deposit the data simultaneously in a clinical system or a national registry. At the Medical Center we can now even send images of forms to our Electronic Medical Record (EMR) System saving a number of steps in that process. It's like zapping your paper form right into the database."

Instead of writing data on paper and later entering that data again using a keyboard and data entry screen, care-givers now just write the data on the screen of the Tablet PC using "digital ink" on an electronic form. The Mi-Forms solution provides state of the art recognition and verification technology to convert handwritten information into digital information.

To increase the quality of the data, Mi-Forms provides immediate feedback to the care-giver regarding all business rules and data checks that are built into the system. For example, if a social security number is entered with only 8 digits instead of the required 9 digits, the system warns the care-giver that the data is violating one of the validation checks.

"This is giant step closer to the holy grail solution for clinical data collection", says Scott McLaughlin, Sr. Technical Advisor at Optiform, the certified Mi-Co reseller that worked closely with Sutter Health. "Paper has always been the faster and easiest way to collect data, but paper can't yell at you when you've made a mistake."

"Implementing a data collection application in the healthcare arena requires knowledge and understanding of a number of key issues and concepts, such as HIPAA compliance, data encryption and data integration via HL7 protocols," continued McLaughlin. "From form design to system administration, the Mi-Forms application is perfectly suited for virtually any healthcare organization that wants to increase the efficiency and the effectiveness of their data capture process."

Mi-Co, the mobile data capture company, provides digital writing software to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire process of capturing and using data. Mi-Co's end-to-end enterprise Mi-Forms Software System enables flexible forms design and the capture, handwriting verification and communication of forms based data for enterprise users. Mi-Forms supports enterprise data capture using Tablet PCs, Digital Pens, Pocket PCs and signature capture devices. Mi-Co is headquartered in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and has a Seattle, Washington customer service center. For more information on Mi-Co, visit www.mi-corporation.com.